To N. A. Leikin, 1883. Moscow.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin was the editor of Oskolki ("Splinters"), the St. Petersburg humor weekly that gave the twenty-three-year-old Chekhov his first steady outlet and his first real editorial relationship. Leikin paid by the line, wanted comedy above all, and had just written to say that two of Chekhov’s recent submissions – "Willow Switch" ("Верба") and "The Thief" ("Вор") – ran too serious for his magazine’s brief. This letter is Chekhov’s reply, and it doubles as a small manifesto on how much gravity a comic weekly can carry before it curdles into "dryness": a short, serious piece now and again, he argues, is not a betrayal of the format but a change of course that keeps the reader’s palate awake, provided it stays light and brief and does not become the rule.

The letter is also an early sample of a lifelong practice: Chekhov angling to place his brothers’ work alongside his own. "Ag Yedinitsyn" is a joking half-pseudonym for his elder brother Alexander Chekhov, himself a journalist and occasional humorist whose talent Chekhov rates honestly – real but undisciplined, stuck in a lyrical vein that does not suit periodical work, and increasingly overtaken by drink and dishevelment, though none of that is said outright here. The closing line, asking whether Leikin received the Easter story "Vanya, Mamma, Auntie, and the Secretary," is business as usual: the young Chekhov was, by 1883, already tracking his own submissions across several magazines at once, supporting a large family on piecework paid by the line.